Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Once upon a time, there was an overheating video card. It begat the Pulse project, the hardware health monitor. Later, overheating house begat DIY Zoning, and since its inception, Pulse started to wither away into oblivion - a few years later I marked its status on SourceForge as "inactive", and today, there's not even a web page for it.

However, recent emergence of Android changed a lot. For a long time, lack of hardware support for DZ was a showstopper - nobody wants a zoning system that needs a computer in order to operate it. Smartphone, however, is a completely different deal.

Almost exactly a year ago I started planning for it. A month ago, I got my hands on the hardware. Today, I can say with confidence that G1 can deliver, and it does make sense to implement a control system with a mobile interface based on Android platform.

One of the lessons of DIY Zoning development was that it is a bad idea to have a monolithic system - I had to split it up three or four times before I was happy with the distributed features of the whole system. Not to repeat the same mistake, the application will be more generic than just a zoning system controller.

It'll be a short while before the feature set is established, the project site is again complete with content, and version control system will have the code - I just don't want to release half-baked barely functioning code prematurely, it is still in the works. It's just that privately expressed interest towards the project exceeded the critical mass recently, and I thought you folks would like to know what I'm working on.